1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to wireless communication appliances and more particularly to apparatus, method, media and signals for controlling a wireless communication appliance.
2. Description of Related Art
There has been a rapid increase in mobile telephone usage as manufacturers have overcome many technical problems associated therewith, including extension of battery life and convenience.
Despite overcoming these technical problems, the increasing usage of mobile telephones is impeded by the inherent resistance of some people to change and accept new technologies. Many people still prefer to use conventional landline telephones despite the availability of better features on mobile telephones as compared to the features available to conventional landlines and to the telephones connected thereto. This greater feature set may include two-way messaging and/or predictive text entry, for example. Feature sets available to conventional landlines are generally applied to the line and not to individual telephone appliances connected to the line. Thus, those who do not make use of mobile telephones generally do not enjoy the features of such telephones.
One reason that people are reluctant to adopt mobile telephones is due to the fact that mobile telephones have a form factor that is designed for mobility. Reduced size, for example, facilitates mobility. However, reductions in size are made at the expense of ease of use. For example, keypad buttons and displays are smaller on mobile telephones than on landline based telephones. In addition, the housings of mobile telephones often act as the handset and are much smaller and less optimized for audio quality than handsets of landline based telephones. Considerable expenditures of research time and money have gone into optimizing the acoustics and ergonomics of landline based handsets since the inception of the telephone in the late 1800's. Much of this optimization has been discarded by present mobile telephone designs.
Another deterrent to the use of mobile telephones is the apparently unresolved issue of whether or not radiation produced by mobile telephones is harmful. Some potential users prefer not to take the risk.
Another deterrent to mobile telephone use is the difficulty experienced when using user response systems that require the entry of passcodes. When using such a system, the user of a mobile telephone typically moves the mobile telephone back and forth, toward and away from the user's ear, so that the user can see and access the keypad, which is usually positioned adjacent an earpiece of the mobile telephone.
Some people, particularly older people, find mobile telephones awkward and uncomfortable to use, due to lack of familiarity. Many people are simply more comfortable using conventional landline based telephones due to the better ergonomics of such telephones, as compared to the ergonomics of mobile telephones. In addition, appliances for the sight impaired or hearing impaired are more readily available for landline based telephones. Further, the impaired have greater familiarity with landline based telephones.
In the past, landline telephones have been connected to mobile telephones using subscriber line interface circuits which require a 4 to 2 wire conversion and a 2 to 4 wire conversion in the voice path. This requires hybrid circuits and requires a high voltage battery feed and a ringing circuit. These create unnecessary complexity.
With the plethora of wireless communication appliances available to consumers today, each manufacturer of wireless communication appliances is faced with the above problems for generally all wireless communication appliance products it produces. Thus, each manufacturer may be required to address each of the above problems for each of its products in order to increase its market share.
What would be desirable is a simple way of providing wireless communication appliance features to users, in a landline-based form easily adaptable to a plurality of different wireless communication appliances.